andy1252

Thanks for the response, Holger, and this just confirms that I'll be waiting for this to come out with my ccard at the ready.

Looks good, and I will probably buy this even though I already have a competitive product. I would add a suggestion if I may though. Well, two actually. First is that the default MSFS Marina Bay hotel is pretty good, actually better than the one the competitor produced (same with the big wheel), so maybe an option to turn the new one (which I assume will be part of the package) on/off as desired? Secondly, and I've no idea if this is even possible as I know nothing about whatever modelling tools are used for these products, one of the things that would make these building based sceneries absolutely masterful would be an element of slight wear or tarnish to the structures. Some of the buildings look like they're made of icing sugar and have just been baked - fresh out of the oven. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking this or any other product, and I truly appreciate the effort that goes into these sceneries, but if it is possible to take some of the "shine" off some of the buildings, I think it would increase the realism enormously. That apart, please roll out more cityscapes! Photogrammetry is ok as long as you stay up above a couple of thousand feet, but if you want to really see a place up close it has to be modelled.

I'm with TTM on this. A year ago I'd have been excited. I have almost everything Orbx has produced (for some reason not entirely clear to me, I don't get turned on by Scandinavia - sorry folks out there) but I haven't touched P3D since MSFS came out. I'll probably still buy this, just to see how it looks, but I don't expect to be overwhelmed by it. That's the nature of LC for me now.

Just wanted to add - that penultimate shot (the girder work from inside the bridge) is un-(word probably wouldn't be allowed <grin>)-believable. I could happily live with that blown up 20 feet wide and filling a wall. Never seen anything quite like it in a sim.

Wonderful! The photogrammetry (still struggling with that word) in MSFS is really impressive stuff from a ways up, but at the level I like to explore - this is what we need! This looks stunning.

Gush! Whinge! Praise! Bitch! I think that about covers it.

Wonderful stuff. We shall all look forward to the roll-out of the Orbx set into the new environment. And thanks for the discount - much appreciated. Gonna be some money spent and some wires humming on the 18th!

Just a couple of questions, Ed. Any chance of encouraging the new partners to offer the rather splendid oldies discount? And has anybody trademarked "Amazorb" yet, or should I jump in now? <grin>

Yep, absolutley magical. Bordering on supercalifragilisticexpialidocous.

It seems that a lot of folk do like this new software, but I shall avoid it as long as possible. I've spent a couple of days now looking at it and thinking about it and the bottom line for me is that is doesn't provide anything new that I want or need. And I really have had enough of re-installing and messing around with stuff for now. So until Orbx makes it compulsory for new product installations, as I've no doubt will be the case at some point, I'm just going to forget it exists, and at that point I guess I'll see how few of its new options I can get away with using.

I'm not having any issues with TE GBS as such, but reading this and looking at my scenery.ini inspires a question or two. I can also see that all the ORBX products get installed as "ORBX_xxxx", which seems to be a technique also used by some other scenery vendors like Aerosoft, DD etc. This makes sense in that a vendor can then ensure that all their own products are in the correct order within their own section of the scenery.ini file. I can see that products like Ortho4XP label their folders/links to begin "z" to ensure placement at the end of the ini list, which is also a good thing. My understanding has been that the XP "Global Airports" should really be below all specifically installed airport entries. I had previously been going through prefixing my folder names with headings like "AAA" for airports, "LIB" for libraries, OVL, ZZZ etc, so that everything was automatically in the correct order alphabetically, but that became too frustrating for a number of reasons. It meant separating out the different folders in the individual airport packages like ORBX's Meig's Field, for instance, plus in ORBX's case would mean that FTXC doesn't recognise that the product is installed. I also played around with X-Organizer to try and arrange things into groups in the same sort of fashion I use with P3D and the SCE, but frankly, I thought it caused more problems than it solved, so I have gone back in and returned all (well, most) folders to their original names, deleted my scenery.ini and let it rebuild itself alphabetically. I then moved the "X-Plane Landmarks" folders above all the ORBX stuff, and "Global Airports" is already alphabetically ahead of all the ORBX entries. And that (finally!) is my question - do I need to split the ORBX entries within my scenery.ini so that all the ORBX airports are actually above Global Airports and only the TrueEarth entries are below it? Your post ends with a mention that Ben will be looking at further development of the FTXC code regarding the scenery.ini environment. For me, this whole scenery.ini environment seems to be one of the weaker points of XP, as controlling large collections of scenery and its associated libraries, mesh entries etc can get messy, especially given that any complicated manual manipulation of the scenery.ini is replaced by a pure alphabetical entry any time there is a problem with the ini file and it gets rebuilt. Perhaps something within FTXC to separate out airports and regions via a naming convention like "Airports_ORBX_KCGX_A / B / C" and "Regions_ORBX_GB_South_TE_A / B / C" would help ensuring things got placed correctly in the bigger scheme of things. Just a suggestion, and only even worthwhile if the answer to my "Global Airports" question is that the ORBX entries should be split above and below it. (I will attach my scenery.ini file, but I'm not asking anyone to waste any brain cells looking at it, I just include it in case it helps clarify my post) While I'm here, I'll also say that I had absolutely zero problems downloading, installing and running TE GBS, which is pretty damn impressive for such a massive piece of software, and I've said in other posts what a marvel I think this product is, so congrats all round, and I don't suppose you've ever considered taking over and running Microsoft, have you John? Now there's a company that could learn a thing or three from ORBX. scenery_packs.ini